Slash and Duff Shake off Velvet Revolver’s Supergroup shackles

A second Velvet Revolver album should take care of any skepticism about whether this is a “real” band or not.

Slash: Everybody started off on the wrong foot. It’s just human nature; everybody’s looking for a little bit of controversy. We had every intention of making a second record and a third record and doing this for as long as we could possibly do it, against whatever odds—which, funnily enough, presented themselves all the way along.

Duff McKagan: There’s always gonna be doubters. Even before Guns N’ Roses made Appetite [for Destruction], they said, “Ah, these guys’ll make a great record… if they live that long.” That was back when I was 21 years old. I’m 43 now and they’re still saying, “Well, so now have you finally proven yourself?” I’ve got nothing to prove, man.

What’s different about the band that made Libertad and the one that made Contraband?

Slash: We just had a lot of experience together. We toured extensively for 19 months. We’d already made a record. We got to know each other as musicians, as people, and whatever else comes along with being together on a bus for that long. Without really knowing it, we just naturally fell into a groove with being a lot more comfortable around each other. So when we went in to make the second record, we knew that we wanted to make a good record and we wanted to make something that we felt really strongly about, just something we thought was cool.

Libertad has a bit more of an R&B, groove kind of feel to it.

Slash:It’s funny you should say that. I go through different phases of what I’m listening to for a certain amount of time, and at that particular time all I was listening to was Albert King and B.B. King and Albert Collins and Elmore James and s*it like that. I had a whole crate of Stax records in my car, and that’s what I was living on. So I’m sure it made some impact on the album, yeah.

There’s been some talk that now that you have two Velvet Revolver albums, you’ll no longer play your older bands’ material in concert. True?

Slash: We sort of had that mentality for a minute. It’s sort of like Pete Townshend breaking his guitar every night; I don’t want to feel like we have to do it. But then we realized that we actually do enjoy playing those songs ’cause they’re our songs. So we’re still sort of doing it, but I just don’t want it to be one of the more identifiable aspects of the band live.

McKagan: Maybe if I was in some bad ’80s band—and maybe some people might argue I was—and the stuff didn’t stand the test of time very well, we may not be into playing it, but both the STP catalog and the Guns N’ Roses catalog, it’s stuff we wrote, number one, and songs we’re really proud of, number two, and it’s great to be able to mix that in. We have two of our own records to draw from, and then we’ve got this great old catalog of pretty kick-ass songs. As a band, what could be better than that?

This entry was posted by RNYK on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 10:00 am